Second Most Bureaucratically Complicated Fleet – Bouprasion, (40 ships) but led by four different chieftains, each specifically in charge of 10 ships (II.615-624)

Actually, this part of the text is interesting for what it reminds us about the demographics and geography of the Greek fleet. The largest delegations are from the strongholds of the Mycenaean age – Mycenae (100), Pylos (90), and Crete (80). The forces from Athens and Sparta are only 50 and 60, respectively. There are also fascinating set-piece mini-narratives of nearly every leader, where they came from, who bore them, what notable skills they had, and so on. It’s easy on first reading for all of these things to blend together as formulaic and similar, but if you look closer, you find little things that actually distinguish the forces. I’d be interested to see a map that plotted where they were each from.

5 Responses to The Face that Launched 1186 Ships

I’m not at all surprised that there’s a lot of very interesting information buried in the Catalog of Ships. However, I stand by the claim that presenting this information in the form of a 300-line list is less than optimally exciting.

Actually, what I find most interesting about the catalog is the impulse to make it in the first place. Presumably, the vast majority of Homer’s listeners/readers had no real interest in, say, Thoas, son of Andraemon, and his 40 ships. Or knew anything else about them. They’re just names to provide volume to the armada.

It reminds me of the lists of kings in some of the books of the Old Testament. But there there’s at least an obvious practical function: you maintain historical chronology through these succession lists, so you can say “It occurred in the twelfth year of the reign of Jehu,” and people will know when you mean. The catalog of ships doesn’t help with that, so it must satisfy some more basic craving to be connected to the past. But why it’s satisfied in this particular way is not clear to me.

Here’s an admittedly facile analogy: it’s like those songs toward the end of rap albums that are just a long list of shout-outs: since I’m hopelessly in-current when it comes to rap, I’ll just reference the Beastie Boys 1998 track on Hello Nasty, called “Dedication.” It’s a catalog of cities where the Beastie Boys presumably have friends. It’s really just an excuse for the display of virtuosity for its own sake. The content is relatively devoid of meaning, freeing the artist up to do other things, like show off their rhyming ability, or, in the case of Homer, their dactylic hexameter abilities.

So no, there’s no interest in the content – it’s like a guitar solo for the singer. Would you say such a section of a song is boring because it doesn’t have lyrics?